The Tester Brothers website is a review blog put in place by myself and my brother Marc. We are located in New-Brunswick Canada. Here you will find reviews on product we had the chance of testing. It will range from gadgets to sports equipment.
If you have any questions or if you would like us to review your product(s) you can reach me at ben@testerbrothers.com . Have a great day and we hope to see you back soon for many in depth reviews!

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Foscam FI8910W review

As a soon to be dad, I was looking for a camera that would let me keep
an eye on my baby girl from anywhere in the house. Upon receiving
the Foscam FI8910W wireless camera, I soon realized I found that and much,
much more.

I have had some wireless cameras in the past but always found them to be
a pain to install and lacking in image quality so my expectations had been
lowered quite a bit. Although the installation of the FI8910W was not the
simplest task to accomplish, anyone with basic computer knowledge will be able
to set it up without problem.

Features

The list of features on this camera is quite extensive so I will stick
to the ones I used the most. First, there is the ability to not only view but
also remotely control the device from multiple devices simultaneously. This
means that both mom and dad can keep an eyes on the sleeping baby from anywhere
in the house. Typical I am downstairs on the computer and my wife is on her
iPad. The peace of mind this camera provides is priceless. Not only can we see
the baby but we can hear her thanks to the microphone the camera is equipped
with.

The camera also has auto IR-LED illumination for night vision. That
simply means that as soon as the camera detects that the amount of light in the
room is insufficient, it will switch to night mode automatically, another great
feature to see the baby late at night.

The camera can be viewed from many different browsers (I tried IE,
Firefox, chrome, safari and Opera and they all worked flawlessly) Also a motion
detection can be activated if you want to use the camera for security or simply
to know when the baby moves.

Style and quality

I have been testing the camera for over a month now and I still love it.
It feels and looks very sturdy. I dropped it once or twice and it survived.
Visually, I didn't find it intrusive at all and have no doubt that it will
easily be incorporated in my daughter's room thanks to the wall mount that came
with it.

Performance

I only encountered a small problem with the camera at first. The camera
would reset on its own to the default camera placement so I contacted the
company and it turns out I had forgotten to upgrade the firmware when I
initially installed the camera. Customer service answered my e-mail extremely
fast and walked me through the process step by step. Since then, the camera
works as intended. Another great thing about the camera is that when I remotely
change its position, it is whisper quite. I can’t even hear it if I try to so
there is no risk of waking up a sleeping baby or of someone even realizing they
are being watched (in a security related scenario). The image quality also
surpassed my expectation. With a resolution of 640x480, I can clearly see the
image and modify the brightness and contrast if need be (I have not had to do
so yet).

The bottom line

The Foscam FI8910W wireless camera met all my needs and then some.
And at 99$ the price is right. Many video monitors are way more
expensive than this one and do not offer half the features this one does. Not
to mention you can access is from anywhere in the house and by more that only
one person.

2 comments:

If the 8910 is anything like the 8918 I have, you can set it to update a dynamic DNS service for you, forward a few ports on your router, and even connect to the the camera from outside your home with the hostname provided by the dynamic dns service.

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About Us

The Tester Brothers website is a review blog put in place by myself and my brother Marc. We are located in New-Brunswick Canada. Here you will find reviews on product that have been sent to us and that we had the chance of testing. It will range all the way from gadgets to toys to sports equipment.
All opinions are our own.
If you have any questions or if you would like us to review your product(s) you can reach us at ben@testerbrothers.com . Have a great day and we hope to see you back soon!